At midday the limestone track widened onto a flat, wind-swept table where the First Northern Station sat astride the fork between the eastern timber road and the western upland highway.
Unlike the temporary canvas awnings and dry-stone sheep pens of the lower Saltglass margin, the First Northern Station was built to survive winter blizzards and toll disputes alike. Its outer curtain wall was laid in two-foot courses of grey pale limestone block, pierced by iron-banded wagon gates on the south, northeast, and west. Inside the courtyard, wagon drivers were watering strings of long-eared mountain mules at a stone water tank fed by a covered spring aqueduct, while coopers hammered fresh iron hoops onto rosin barrels bound for the low country. The air smelled of sharp wood-smoke, horse sweat, wet lime mortar, and the dry, bitter-salt dust blowing off the foothills.
Kezra counted her pace beads all the way through the southern gate arch and stopped only. Just then, the handcart’s iron tires rested beside the central well-curb. Sixteen thousand four hundred paces of unbroken, continuously walked route from the Saltglass rim. Every bead represented a checked stretch of limestone, gravel, and packed marl, personally walked and recorded without a single step skipped or estimated from a hilltop vantage.
